alt Hacker NewsThis is not necessarily true if you spend more than 2 seconds thinking about it.
If I'm raking leaves all day I eventually reach diminishing returns. My arms might even start to get tired and actually make me lose skill. Now I got a leaf raking robot which is not perfect but does 50% of the job and gives me free time to recover my hands and research new leaf raking techniques, maybe even invest into a leaf blower. Did I not become better at raking leaves?
People are not calculators - all these simplistic takes are frankly insulting to human capability.
Replies
> Did I not become better at raking leaves?
Only in a sense which is obviously not at all what's being discussed. If you hire a personal chef, have you gotten better at cooking? What about a nanny, have you gotten better at raising your children?
Of course automating some cognitive processes can free your time for other, more fulfilling aspects. But there's certainly no guarantee that that's the case.
> People are not calculators - all these simplistic takes are frankly insulting to human capability.
Funny example. Which do you think is more common, people who are innumerate because they believe using a calculator is sufficient, or people who are highly numerate and believe learning arithmetic was a waste of time?
You don’t need to go to irrelevant analogies such as removing leaves. Humans develop expertise by overcoming their struggles. When you delegate thinking and engaging with source material to a software you’re skipping the actual thing that makes us improve intellectually speaking.
Have you never had to learn a new language or a music instrument? AI can just translate a text into your native language, or tell you how the sentence should be built, but you have to actually actively engage with the low level process of trying to do yourself all the little boring things, a lot, for a long time, to develop the intuition and expertise